Plato As Prozac

Philosophical Counselors help people understand how the great minds in history have dealt with hardship.

Aristotle

"In all of nature, there is something of the marvelous."

Ave Maria

This started out to be a rather long-winded post, but then I got hit upside the head by the reality of having a four year old and a newborn and realized that I don't have time for long-winded posts! So, the abridged version: I was recently reading a magazine article that asked me to pick a person who inspired me. I picked Mary the mother of Jesus. Being Catholic, maybe that's not surprising, but it goes deeper than that. Since becoming a mother, I've thought more and more about her, what her life must have been like. She is, to me, the best example of trusting God despite no matter what happens. We see her embracing whatever God sends her way throughout the gospels, from the nativity to the cross to the resurrection. We see her give birth to Jesus and then watch him die and then see him rise again. How did she do it? How did she handle it? Upon becoming pregnant with Jesus, her life was in danger. She could have been stoned for adultery! And yet, not only did she accept being the mother of Jesus humbly - "Behold the handmaid of the Lord" (Lk. 1:38) - she actually went on to praise God, completely faithful that He would fulfill what He promised. "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." (Lk. 1:46,47) When presenting Jesus in the Temple, Mary is told that "A sword will pierce your own soul too." (Lk. 1:35) Mary never runs from difficulty or pain. This is almost impossible for me to comprehend. Across all faiths, it seems that the path to enlightenment is by embracing whatever God sends you at the moment, taking the good with the bad, but realizing that the transience of both does not change the nature of God. I can understand that mentally, but putting it into practice is another thing. The fact that she stands at the foot of the cross, helplessly, watching her son die. Did she have any idea at that moment about the resurrection? Then Jesus, ignoring his own pain, instructs his disciple John to adopt Mary as his mother (Jn. 19:26, 27). Mary always holds fast, she always stays the course. I would like to have that kind of strength, that kind of faith, and I would like my children to have it as well. I would like us to be brave enough to fulfill our purposes in life, whatever they may be, with the knowledge that doing so might sometimes cause us pain, and to be okay with that. The alternative is a life half-lived.

Note: The icon above shows the Blessed Mother holding a prayer that reads, in Greek, "Our Jesus Christ hear the prayer of your mother." It is located in the Church of the Dormition of Theotokos in Kondopoga, Russia.

Completion

There's this blog that is part of the daily "friends" list that I read, and all it is is this dude's love of G.K. Chesterton and endless quotes from the same. I hate that blog, but, you know, you don't want to hurt the writer's feelings, etc., etc.. And, also, there's the hypocrisy thing. Has this not started out as a blog of my love of Edith Hamilton and endless quotes from the same? Well, the tea party's over, lady. Today is the last Hamilton post in awhile. Future posts will draw on more diverse sources of information.

I believe Ms. Hamilton summarizes "The Greek Way" quite nicely on pages 255-258. Since we have not evolved much since the time these words were written (1930), her words are as appropriate today as they were then. Any notes in parentheses are my own attempts at providing context.

The opposition between the spirit and the mind which we are chiefly conscious of is that between the individual and the community... For nineteen hundred years (again, this was written in 1930) ...we have been in school to the foremost individualist of all time who declared that the very hairs of each man's head were numbered (Christ) .... It is not men's greed, nor their ambition, nor yet their machines, it is not even the removal of their ancient landmarks, that is filling the present world with turmoil and dissension, but our new vision of the individual's claim against the majority's claim.

Things were simple in days of old when the single man had no right at all if a common good conflicted, his life taken for any purpose that served the public welfare, his blood sprinkled over the field to make the harvest (coughoilcough) plentiful. Then a new idea, the most disturbing ever conceived, dawned, that ever human being had rights... The individual had made his appearance and nothing was to be plain and simple again; no clear distinction could be drawn any more between what was just and unjust...

Along with this realization of each unit in the mass has come an over-realization of ourselves. We are burdened with over-realization. Not that we can perceive too clearly the rights and wrongs of every human being, but that we feel too deeply our own, to find in the end that what has meaning only for each one alone has no real meaning at all...

Greek scientists... saw a whole made up of related parts, and with the sweep of their vision the old world of hodge-podge...fell away and a world of order took its place... Greek artists... saw that what is permanent important in a man and unites him to the rest...

(Modern) science has made generalization of greater truths than the Greeks could reach through a greater knowledge of individual facts. If we can follow that method and through our own intense realization of ourselves reach a unity with all men, seeing as deeply as the great tragic poets of old saw, that what is of any importance in us is what we share with all, then there will be a new distribution in the scale and balance held so evenly in those great days of Greece that may be ours as well...

The bitterest conflicts that have divided the minds of men and set family against family, and brother against brother, have not been waged for emperor or king, but for one side of the truth at the suppression of the other side... In our present...adjustment (the beginning of World War II) which not only seems to us, but is, more difficult than any before because we are aware of so much more, it is worth our while to consider the adjustments achieved in the past. Of them all, the Greek was the most complete.

Inspirational Tragedy

My husband and I were watching a documentary on The Discovery Channel on Roman vice which originally aired a couple of years ago.  One of the remarkable things in it was the martyrdom of the Christians, the remarkable thing being that the Roman emperors, Nero specifically, sought to present the Christians as criminals but, ironically, the martyrs faced death with such bravery that they ended up converting many more people to the faith rather than being dissuaded from it.  How can this be?  And,  yet, it has been this way all along.  The idea of inspirational tragedy is, in fact, the very source of the continued popularity of the Greek tragedies.  Ms. Hamilton writes on page 231 of "The Greek Way"...

"In the Greek tragedy, the figures are seen very simply from afar, parts of a whole that has no beginning and no end, and yet, in some strange fashion their remoteness does not diminish their profound tragic and individual appeal...  There is only one other masterpiece that can help us to our own understanding of this method, the life of Christ."

I asked myself recently what it is that I wanted out of spirituality.  Not just out of Christianity, but out  of Spirituality in general.  The answer was, first of all, to eliminate the fear of death, both my own and of my loved ones.  And the second answer was to add depth and flavor and excitement to my living days.  In short, I want to get the most out of life, and to believe that what I do matters, that what everyone does matters, and to understand how it matters, and how it is that what we think - what our attitudes and intentions are - matter along with what we do.  And the person who exemplifies not only a life that matters, but the conquering of death itself is, for me, Jesus Christs.  In the same way, the ancient Greeks looked to the bravery and honor of Achilles and Odysseus as examples of how to act in the face of death and temptation.  They had a different view of the afterlife than I have, but what unites us, what unites all peoples throughout history, is the need to live a life that matters. The writers of the Gospels and Homer painted their heroes with broad, fuzzy strokes precisely because, if they were illustrated in too much detail, the reader would not be able to identify with them.  We do not know what their favorite song was, what their pet peeve was, what kind of hair gel they used, did they prefer talipia or sea bass, no.  Those things, which we in America seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about in our own celebrities, did not and do not matter in someone really worthy of emulating.  What matters was their character and how that character naturally produced action and the sum of those actions ultimately produced lives that matter.  

And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown - a life that mattered.

The Heroism of Hope

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light..."

Isaiah 9:2

November was not a good month for my nation or for me personally for that matter.  Nevertheless, I think that we Americans are still lucky because we have hope.  No matter how one feels about the outcome of the presidential election, we have some hope that, eventually, our economy will return to normal, we'll find jobs, we'll be able to afford things again someday, etc.. There are many nations in the world that have suffered generation after generation of poverty and violence, so much so that they can't possibly see any future for themselves other than more poverty and violence.  We are not that way, and we must not let ourselves become that way or leave that as a legacy for our children.  As a Christian, I think that this ingrained sense of hopefulness common to Americans comes directly from the role that the Bible has played in the collective psyche of our country.  The idea that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, has conquered all death and even Hell itself is remarkable to me.  The context in which Jesus was born  (Jerusalem conquered - again - living under brutal foreign rule), and then to say, essentially, "these circumstances don't matter;  how you act under them does".  That was a whole other way of looking at things.

The great minds of ancient Greece invariably turned their attention to a whole new way of looking at religion as well.  It is my hope to finish my study of Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way" by the end of the year.  On page 220, she talks about Homer's attitude towards the Greek gods and goddesses.

"The stamp of the Greek genius is everywhere in his two epics, in the banishment of the ugly and the frightful and the senseless; in the conviction that gods were like men and men able to be godlike; in the courage and the undaunted spirit with which heroes faced any opponent, human or divine, even Fate herself; in the prevailing atmosphere of reason and good sense."

Now, at a later time I might like to argue about some of her points.  I've read recently "The Iliad" and, too long ago, "The Odyssey", and I have to say that there is plenty of ugliness, frightfulness, and senselessness throughout.  Nevertheless, I will agree that, in both works, the prevailing theme of good overcoming evil, and the very basis for all our notions of what it means to be a hero can be found in those works.  

Ms. Hamilton goes on to talk about how one of the defining characteristic of any religion is that of "great communal emotion".  We live in an increasingly isolated society, so I know that maybe many people have not experienced this feeling.  As someone who has, I can attest that when it is marked with the spirit of peace and love and, yes, hope, it is a wonderful thing.  I highly recommend it.  

She says that this "great communal emotion"...

"...is what Aristotle meant when he said tragedy purified through pity and awe.  Men were set free from themselves when they all realized together the universal suffering of life"

- pg. 224

"...whether there are gods or not we cannot say, and life is too short to find out."

- Protagoras

Ah, Protagoras: a scientist always looking for hard evidence.  If one were to look at the hard evidence of the American economy, at the hard evidence of even my own family's financial quagmire (in which we do, indeed, realize together with the rest of the world the universal suffering of life), if one were to look at those circumstances, the mountain of debt, the health problems, the emotional problems, the bad blood and baggage, one would surely be consumed with despair.  The hard evidence proclaims that no one gets out of here alive.  To look at the hard evidence is to see no other alternative than to blow one's brains out.  But Plato, that visionary mind, saw something different when he said that...

"He who not being inspired and having no touch of  madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art - he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted."

Indeed, our world is full of "art" by which we might, supposedly, somehow manipulate God into doing our bidding.  But, it's not art, it's heart.  It's not the circumstances, but what one does under the circumstances.  And the one thing that should be clear to anyone, regardless of whether they believe in God or not, should be that it is precisely what we are doing that has to change.  Everything has to change, it is the natural order, even the natural order of ideas themselves.  Ms. Hamilton speaks about the upheaval and subsequent rebirth of interest in religion that occurred after the Peloponnisian War.  

"One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change, it would be dead."

- pg. 225

God, being perfect, cannot change certainly, as He does not need to.  However, our view of Him has to change, must change, and has changed over time.  Mankind is simply incapable of taking in something as large as God in all at once.  I am someone who hates change.  I hate moving.  I hate having to make new friends.  I crave security.  But in insecure times, it behooves even someone like me to seek out a new attitude.  My generation, GenX, we are collectively a bunch of naysayers.  We can immediately find the downside to any argument.  But, I once had a boss who said, "I'm a glass half-full person.  I cannot function with the glass half-empty all the time."  And she was right.  We cannot function living in fear all the time.  We cannot move forward when we are afraid that it's pointless.  We certainly can't inspire our children or provide them any kind of sense of security without a firm belief in hope.  We must be brave, and we must learn to enjoy ourselves somehow.  

My Christmas wish is for a rebirth of hope and joy in our nation.   

I am Euripides of Salamis, and I approve this message.

"The dogmatisms of each age wear out.  Statements of absolute truth grow thin, show gaps, are discarded.  The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.  The ultimate critique of pure reason is that its results do not endure.  Euripides' assaults upon the superstructure of religion were forgotten; what men remembered and came to know him for was the pitying understanding of their own suffering in a strange world of pain, 
and the courage to tear down old wrongs and never give up seeking for new things that should be good.  And generation after generation since have placed him securely with those very few great artists

'Who feel the giant agony of the world,

And more, like slaves to poor humanity, 

Labor for mortal good...'"

- "The Greek Way", Edith Hamilton, page 214

Note:  Inclusion of a particular photograph does not necessarily indicate political endorsement by the author.  Not necessarily anyway.